Archive for May, 2018

Janet Currie, a professor at Princeton University, writes in a research brief, entitled Addressing the Opioid Epidemic: Is There a Role for Physician Education, that “there is a striking relationship between opioid prescribing and medical school rank.”

In the article, Currie discusses her 2006-2014 study, conducted with Molly Schnell, a Ph.D. candidate in Economics, concluding, “If all general practitioners had prescribed like those from the top-ranked school [Harvard], we would have had 56.5% fewer opioid prescriptions and 8.5% fewer overdose deaths.”

Currie’s argument is based not only on “the number of opioid overdose deaths in the United States” which have “doubled,” but the fact that “many of those deaths were caused by drugs legally prescribed by a physician.” Currie’s premise is that not only do physicians need to know what they are prescribing but patients themselves need to be aware what physicians are prescribing to them—and how knowledgeable they may be.

“A distinguishing feature of the opioid epidemic is that many overdoses and deaths can be attributed to legal opioids that were prescribed by a physician,” Currie said. “Training aimed at reducing prescribing rates among the most liberal prescribers, who disproportionately come from the lowest-ranked medical schools, could have large public health benefits.”

Effects of opioids on injured workers

In Market Watch, Maria Lamagna describes the relationship between opioids and the American worker as being “increasingly” complex. Lamagna notes that while the opioid crisis is “devastating families and costing the country billions of dollars,” when opioids are used prudently, they can allay pain and enable workers to remain in the workplace, instead of being too ill to work.

A recent study by the Workers’ Compensation Research Institute in Cambridge, Mass., the Alice Peck Day Memorial Hospital in Lebanon, N.H. and the Department of Economics at the University of California, Irvine, showed “longer-term use of opioids roughly tripled the amount of money employers spend on temporary disability benefits, compared to workers with similar injuries who [did] not get opioid prescriptions. The researchers did not find evidence that opioids prescribed in workers’ compensation cases would be beneficial.”

The conclusion Lamagna draws is that “considering how many risks are associated with opioids, is it even a good idea to prescribe opioids in the first place, with the hope that employees will get back to work sooner? It turns out, long-term use of opioids may actually cost employers more, because employees who use opioids for an extended period have to be out of work for longer.”

Lamagna writes that the study, distributed by the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, “should not suggest that opioid prescriptions are always unnecessary.” However, she suggests “there is at least some overuse of longer-term opioids, they concluded, considering that workers with similar injuries could return to work sooner without using opioids over a long period.”

The learning curve regarding opioid prescriptions

The takeaway from the Currie and Schnell study and the Lamagna articles is that there is a learning curve regarding the prescription of opioids—both for the physician and the patient. This poses a dilemma: do we work in an amount of daily discomfort, or do we refuse to tolerate pain and leave open the possibility of opioid addiction and an endless cycle of dependence? It is up to patients and doctors to investigate non-addictive remedies for pain.

For more than 30 years, the knowledgeable attorneys at the Law Offices of Deborah G. Kohl have been successfully helping hard-working people like you in New England to obtain the just compensation they deserve. We realize your case is about more than just finances. It’s about justice. It’s about holding all those accountable who are responsible for their actions—and for your injuries.

Companies have to hold aspects of their operation in balance all the time. They must deal with opposing forces such as supply and demand or income and costs. Too often, employee safety and productivity are treated as another equation for an employer to balance.

However, this view of workplace safety doesn’t just threaten employees. According to David Michaels, Assistant Secretary of Labor at OSHA from 2009-2017, it is not even accurate.

Merging the Fields

Michaels recently wrote a piece for Harvard Business Review about his experiences at OSHA and the important lessons he learned through them. The main thrust of the article is his claim that workplaces can be profitable and safe at the same time, if these two goals are seen as complementary rather than opposing forces. In fact, he argues that the vast majority of workplace accidents are preventable and serve as evidence that production is not being properly managed.

Some key ways employers can ensure workplace safety include having upper management invested in safety, embracing safety and health management systems, keeping safety as a central aspect of operational plans instead of a separate system, and valuing the input of OSHA and similar inspectors as low-cost safety consultants. These are all key systems that will go far in ensuring that safety is given its proper importance in the workplace, and their applications may differ from one workplace to another. Michaels details them well. There are others he discusses, however, that deserve special, and largely universal, attention.

Humans, Not Data Points

Michaels also talks about the need to focus on identifying workplace dangers before they strike rather than waiting for recordable incidents to occur, and why employees should not bear the blame for workplace accidents. Ultimately, both of these concerns are about trusting employees and viewing them primarily as people who understand their environment and have real needs rather than as data points waiting to be calculated.

Employers need to be proactive about collecting information from employees about potential dangers in the workplace, including near-miss incidents, unsafe conditions, and other suggestions. By having employees notice these issues and then taking action on them, employers show that they value workers, and this in turns helps employees invest in their work and their duties.

Employees are also human, and as such, will occasionally make mistakes due to tiredness, distraction, or simple miscalculation. Safe workplaces have backup systems to prevent minor mistakes from causing major injuries, and understand that injuries are often the result of multiple factors that could have been prevented with operational measures. Michaels advises that “the most effective path to preventing injuries is to consider human errors as the consequences, rather than as causes, of operational failure.”

When workplace systems break down, employees suffer. They should not then have to also endure the blame for preventable dangers. If you have suffered a workplace injury, contact us today to discuss your next steps.